Less Talk, More Tests from North Korea

In the past, pundits have dismissed North Korea’s threats as cries for attention. But lately Pyongyang has backed talk with action.

Photograph by KCNA / Reuters

The latest country to crash the nuclear club, North Korea, is what the Arms Control Association calls a “nuclear-armed state.” This is a category that includes India, Pakistan, and Israel: countries that have developed nuclear weapons that are not recognized under international law. The arsenals of the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom were effectively legitimized when the Non-Proliferation Treaty took effect, in 1970.

On Friday morning, North Korea detonated its fifth and most powerful nuclear weapon in an underground test. If further proof were needed that North Korea has the nuclear weapons its propagandists have long boasted of, this was it. The South Korean defense ministry, which measured the detonation as an earthquake, estimated the yield at ten kilotons: not as big as the fifteen-kiloton bomb that devastated Hiroshima, in 1945, but about twice the size of North Korea’s last nuclear test, in January. (North Korea said that the January blast was a hydrogen bomb, but experts doubt the claim.)

More frightening than the size of the blast is that, with this test, North Korea appears closer to mounting a nuclear warhead. In a statement released Friday, North Korea’s official news agency said that the latest test “examined and confirmed the structure and specific features” of a nuclear warhead “that has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets.” The statement continued, “the standardization of the nuclear warhead will enable the D.P.R.K. to produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power.” Intelligence officials who have analyzed photographs of missile parts previously released by the North Koreans are assuming that the claim is true.

The latest nuclear test has elicited the usual rounds of condemnation from the international community, and warnings of tougher sanctions. It is such a familiar routine that Joel S. Wit, a veteran negotiator with North Korea and the founder of the Web site 38North.org, likens it to the oft-quoted scene from “Casablanca” where Captain Louis Renault professes he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on” and then orders his gendarmes to “round up the usual suspects.”

The North Koreans have hardly been coy about their intentions to create a nuclear weapon capable of reaching the United States. In a military parade in October, they displayed a mockup of an intercontinental ballistic missile—named the KN-08 by the Pentagon—which is believed to have a range of about six thousand miles, far enough to reach Los Angeles. Before the Workers’ Party Congress in March, the North Korean press featured front-page photos of the young leader Kim Jong Un posing with a reëntry vehicle, an essential component of a workable intercontinental ballistic missile. In 2013, Kim posed with his generals in front of a map on which was clearly written, in Korean, “Plan to hit the U.S. mainland.”

In the past, the pundits accused North Korea of threatening attacks as a cry for attention, hoping to engage the United States in negotiations. The word “brinkmanship” appeared in countless articles about Pyongyang’s negotiating tactics. But lately the North Koreans are talking less, and doing more. On Monday, they fired three ballistic missiles from their west coast into the Sea of Japan. Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, believes that most of the recent tests have been successful. “If they continue nuclear testing, they are only going to get better,” Kimball said.

In 1994, the United States and North Korea signed an agreement in Pyongyang, called the Agreed Framework, in which Pyongyang promised to freeze plutonium production in exchange for energy assistance. That deal quickly unravelled after George W. Bush’s Administration accused the North Koreans of cheating on the pact with a secret uranium-enrichment program. That was followed by a decade of “six-party talks,” which were led by China and included Japan, South Korea, and Russia, as well as the United States and North Korea.

The last serious suggestion of an agreement was the Leap Day deal of February 29, 2012, when North Korea agreed to a moratorium on long-range missile tests, nuclear tests, and uranium enrichment in exchange for food aid. The deal collapsed a few weeks later, when Pyongyang held a satellite launch. Since then, Kimball says, the Obama Administration “has decided not to take the significant political risk of engaging with the North.”

The North Koreans have since indicated that they would be willing to talk denuclearization, most recently in a July 6th statement, in which they demanded the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from South Korea. Despite Kim Jong Un’s goofy hairdo and over-the-top rhetoric, veteran North Korea watchers believe he is a rational player in the geopolitical game. "Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t out to get you" is one sentiment I have frequently heard expressed.

If negotiating with North Korea is not politically palatable for the U.S., what’s next? Sanctions against North Korea have proved laughably ineffective. In fact, the North Korean economy has improved slightly under Kim Jong Un, who lifted some market restrictions after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in December, 2011. Chinese and Middle Eastern companies continue to invest in North Korea. An emerging upper class struts around Pyongyang with smartphones.

The drab Soviet time capsule that was Pyongyang is getting a modernist makeover. There are high-rise apartments, health clubs, pizza parlors, and a new water park. In an article about Pyongyang architecture, Julie Makinen, of the Los Angeles Times_,_ wrote about a fifty-story skyscraper, on Future Science Street, “crowned with a golden planet," noting that "its sleek tiers of stacked oblong shapes call to mind a cartoon spaceport, ready to dock flying saucers.”

“If I were a North Korean,” Wit, of 38North.org, said, “I would just laugh when we threaten them with sanctions.”

Barbara Demick is a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and served as the Beijing bureau chief from 2008 to 2014. She is the author of “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea” and “Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.”